Amby and the Hawk

Our daughter Amberly came to Japan to visit us for 10 days. There will be more about that in later posts but this is about one specific incident. We had gone to visit Amanohashidate - the Stairway to Heaven. One of the three most beautiful places in Japan.It is a strand of land about 4km long stretching across a bay. You climb a mountain and then look back at the bay through your legs. The water then looks like the sky and the spit of land crossing the bay looks like a stairway climbing into the sky. You may have to squint a little but that is the idea. We had parked on the far side of the bay and rented bikes to ride across the spit of land. We rode a ropeway to the top of the mountain on the opposite side of the bay and looked through our legs at the stairway to heaven.

On the way down, somehow we triggered a domino effect of bicycles where one tipped onto the next and the next and the next and so on. It started somewhere above us but since we were the only ones there we felt obliged to pick up all of the bikes. Then we had a brisk ride back across the bay.

Amberly and her friend Courtney decided to get an ice cream cone as we strolled back along the street through the tourist souvenir shops. Suddenly there was a blur of action, Amberly gave a squeak and we all turned to look. A bird had swooped down and Karen and Courtney thought it had pooped, narrowly missing Amberly. What had happened in reality was a large hawk dove in and attacked Amby's ice cream cone, but couldn't grab it, instead taking off the top of the ice cream cone and knocking it to the ground. Everyone was amazed as we figured out what happened and everyone in the area was shocked and had a good laugh. Then as we watched the hawk came back twice more trying to pick up the ice cream without much luck. Amberly came away unscathed except for a racing heart, no ice cream and little mark on one finger from the hawk's talon. All in all it became a great adventure and a wonderful story to tell.